Month: April 2011

My post on Ken Livingstone’s plans to share a platform with his disgraced former race adviser, Lee Jasper, next week prompted an emergency mobilisation of the groupies. One of Ken’s most trusting fans broke almost a month’s silence on his blog to assure us that the Once And Future Mayor had “confirmed” he would not reappoint Jasper if re-elected.

Ken himself suddenly discovered a pressing “family commitment” rendering him unexpectedly unavailable to speak alongside his former aide. Even Jasper, with characteristic good taste, has today tweeted: “I will not be rejoining Ken’s team if re-elected. Done my time on the plantation.” Comparing a City Hall job paid £127,000 a year to slavery tells you more about Lee Jasper than I ever could.

Ken’s promise over Jasper, on the day of his resignation, was clear: “I bet my own life that they will clear Lee Jasper, and I will reappoint him when they do.” Jasper wasn’t cleared, of course – he was condemned in a report by the district auditor – but that hasn’t stopped Ken repeatedly claiming that he has been.

I have a feeling that the latest Ken “confirmation” may well be on a par with those other Ken confirmations that he would “save the Routemaster,” “hold down” the congestion charge to £5 until 2013 and “reinstate” the charge’s western extension zone.

And as the blogger Mark Wallace has noted, there’s also something oddly similar in the words used by both Ken and Jasper to describe the death while under arrest of the reggae singer Smiley Culture. Jasper has been leading a campaign over the death – and was quoted in the Standard on 5 April saying that the black community is at “boiling point” over the issue. Ken, who is definitely, definitely not being advised by Jasper, was quoted in the Sun on 26 April as saying that the black community is at “boiling point” over the issue. (Jasper, by the way, claims that the press just get him mixed up with Ken. That was precisely Ken’s problem at the last election, as it happens.)

Let’s remind ourselves what Ken really thinks about the monarchy, shall we? It was, he wrote in 1996 (for that well-known organ of progressive thought, The Sun), “our most sordid soap-opera,” the result of “1100 years of inbreeding,” populated by “not very bright…airheads in high heels” with “Fergie’s HIV tests and Di’s military maneouvres on full public display.” Tasteful, I think you’ll agree.

And Ken’s thoughts on the happy groom whose day he wants to smooth? “It is in the interest of the Royals to end the monarchy,” he wrote. “We must abolish the monarchy. Let us hope it is in time to save Prince William from the same screwed-up life.”

In politics, it’s always best to be true to what you think. That was, of course, supposed to be Ken’s USP. Now, however, worried about the dislike with which he is viewed by the white working class, he has thumbed clumsily through the populist playbook.

I don’t actually think anyone cares what Ken thinks about the royals. But people can spot a phony.

Older readers may remember Lee Jasper, the £127,000-a-year Ken Livingstone race and policing adviser forced out in a cronyism scandal, who came to stand for everything that was sleaziest about Ken’s City Hall. In recent months, despite Ken’s denials, the signs have been growing that Ken, if re-elected, is preparing to do what he promised in 2008 – and bring Jasper back.

Next week, according to emails sent out by the organisers, Ken and Jasper will share a platform for the first time since the scandal, at the May Day rally in Trafalgar Square no less. It will be a major boost to Jasper’s attempts to rebuild his presence on the London political stage. He has started turning up at City Hall, on his old beat, recently disrupting a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority in protest at the death while under arrest of a man charged with serious drug offences. And Ken strongly defends Jasper, hosting him several times on his LBC radio show and claiming that he has been “cleared” and that various enquiries have found “no evidence against him…no-one has come up with any wrongdoing.”

Millions more went to other organisations run by some of Jasper’s other friends, many of them based in the same small room at a business centre in Kennington and virtually none of them delivering anything in return for the cash. To this day, substantial sums remain unaccounted for.

The main independent inquiry into the affair, by the District Auditor, condemned Jasper’s behaviour as “not appropriate” and “below the standards expected” of a GLA officer. It found that Jasper had concealed his relationship with Chouhan and that there was no documentary evidence to show why the money had been paid to her company. Even Livingstone himself conceded, in an LBC interview on 6 March 2008, that Jasper had “breached absolutely” the GLA’s code of conduct.

I can, of course, understand Jasper’s obsessive need to lie and rewrite history – but Ken’s use of the same tactics is a little more puzzling, and can be explained only if he is planning a future for his ex-race advisor.

For all his advancing years, Ken Livingstone still likes to keep abreast of the news. He discovered something terrible yesterday: Boris Johnson is a Conservative! Ken’s spokesman stormed that the appointment of Eddie Lister, leader of Wandsworth council, as Boris’s new chief of staff, “shows that his administration is deepest Tory Thatcherite blue”.

Lister’s appointment is highly significant: under him and his predecessors, Wandsworth became both highly efficient and a Tory fortress, not things you can yet say about Boris’s City Hall. Sir Simon Milton, Lister’s predecessor as chief of staff, always struck me as someone who was good at sailing the ship, but didn’t greatly mind what direction it sailed in. Lister might well do better at banishing the more-than-residual Livingstonism which lingers in the Thames-side testicle.

Lister’s most important job is at transport, the alpha and omega of the mayoralty and Boris’s greatest weakness. It is fair, as Livingstone also says, to see the second-tier adviser reshuffle announced today as Boris’s attempt to get a so far elusive grip on the bloated behemoth that is Transport for London.

Daniel Moylan, TfL’s deputy chair, is stepping up to more of a full-time role in the post – dropping his deputy leadership of Kensington and Chelsea council. Moylan is a main architect of perhaps Boris’s single greatest achievement – the end of the Tube PPP. He is another one of those politicians who wants to “do” things rather than just “be” things.

I don’t know Isabel Dedring, the new deputy mayor for transport, at all, so I reserve judgment. She was, however, until 2008 a senior figure in TfL (indeed she came to City Hall on secondment from it) and was chief of staff to its former commissioner, Bob Kiley. These were the formative years in which the failed culture of TfL was set.

Only yesterday Ben Rogers, of the independent Centre for London think-tank, part of Demos, tweeted: “Meeting at TfL. Interesting how ‘socialist’ they are even under Boris – little future for cars, it’s all public transport.” Alas, TfL, as any Tube user can testify, isn’t much good at public transport either.

Boris’s number one priority must be to improve service on the Underground. This should actually be quite possible – the Jubilee line can surely only improve and surely at some point over the next twelve months the signalling will start to work a bit better. He ought to be able to show a rising curve of service by election day.

Yet he also needs to remember that hundreds of thousands of people voted for him because they quite like their cars. TfL has successfully frustrated all Boris’s manifesto promises to make traffic flow more freely, despite growing evidence that this is actually better for the environment (and for public transport users, ie bus passengers) than constant starting and stopping at red lights. There is discontent among his core vote about this.

TfL also remains stuck in an old-fashioned heavy-metal mindset where the answer to every transport problem is a new, lumbering, carbon-generating bus or train. Unlike more advanced transport administrations elsewhere in Europe and Japan, they are not putting at their heart non-carbon solutions such as cycling, walking and reducing the demand to travel. Indeed they still boast, Soviet-style, of the ever-increasing hordes rammed, in ever-greater discomfort, into their ever-more-crowded buses and trains.

Remember the “living bridge?” The “island airport?” The Olympic sculpture? At least none of those mayoral gimmicks involved significant amounts of public money. Today, it was announced that Boris Johnson will spend £50.5 million of taxpayers’ cash on constructing a new cable car across the Thames from the Dome to Custom House.

This is a project born largely of a gag. In the Mayor’s public speeches, he can usually rely on a big laugh when he jokes that it is a tribute to Vince Cable. Today, however, the joke is on us.

It was supposed to be privately funded. But the private sector has been understandably reluctant to pony up. So, in the middle of a public spending crisis, Boris is spending tens of millions of the transport budget on what is essentially a tourist attraction for out-of-towners.

Attempts to give it some sort of public transport rationale are threadbare – the Jubilee Line already provides an almost exactly parallel service. When it’s working, of course. How is that resignalling project going, by the way?

The cable car has already doubled in cost from the initial estimates. The rush to build it in a year – in time for that other great sinkhole of vaguely justified public money, the Olympics – will almost certainly mean that costs escalate even further. Every contractor involved will take it as a green light to scalp the taxpayer with “unforseen” urgency charges. The timetable is also incredibly ambitious.

The whole thing could quite easily become a running sore at the exact moment when Boris does not need it – in the months immediately before his bid for re-election.

In the meantime, of course, passengers on the transport network that actual Londoners actually use continue to suffer substandard performance. And passengers on the transport service along the river (that actual Londoners actually use, and whose expansion would be a worthy monument for Boris) have seen their boats cut for want of a subsidy about one-hundredth of that now being blown on the cable car. (And yes, I know they hope to get commercial sponsorship – but realistically, that will come nothing close to recouping the construction cost.)

The charge against Boris is that he has been a do-little mayor who lacks seriousness. It’s not actually true – he has done a couple of very important things, such as getting rid of Ian Blair and the Tube PPP. But this decision reinforces all the doubts about him. It will also undermine his claim with Whitehall that his budget (the vast majority of which comes from the Treasury) is necessary and justified. It is a strategic mistake.

Some fascinating straws in the wind from Birmingham, proposed destination of the Government’s £17 billion high-speed supertrain.

If anywhere was going to be in favour of HS2, it should surely be Brum – which stands to see its London service speeded up the most (by a claimed 35 minutes.) The council and various local business groups have been dutifully campaigning for the albatross.

But in a survey by the Birmingham Post, two-thirds of those who responded opposed the new line and 70% said other transport investment should be a higher priority. Fifty-five per cent also disputed the Government’s claim that high-speed rail would be good for the local economy.

The survey doesn’t appear to have been a representative opinion poll, so it really is only a straw in the wind – but it is still interesting that the pro-HS2 camp has been unable to mobilise supporters in what should be the scheme’s heartland.

Even more interestingly, the Post itself has written a leader saying that the Government’s case for HS2 has “run out of steam” and adding that Whitehall’s forecasts of passenger numbers and projected economic benefits “appear to be inflated.”

That is absolutely right. HS2 could, in fact, substantially damage existing plans for the regeneration of Birmingham’s Eastside. The centrepiece of the scheme, a new £123 million university campus on which £30 million has already been spent, was scrapped after the Government said that HS2 needed the site. A new scheme, for a campus only just over half the size, has now been drawn up – and the university is still waiting for its £30 million back. The new, shrunken campus is to go on a site planned for a new “vertical theme park” – which has in turn also been scrapped.

Inflated, too, has been the Government’s claim of the journey time saving of high-speed rail. The figure they quote for the fastest time on the existing line – 1 hour and 24 minutes – is wrong. The fastest train at present does it in 1 hour 12 minutes, so the saving is 23 minutes, not 35 – and even less once you factor in that HS2’s Brum terminus is further away from the city centre than New Street, the existing stop.

It simply won’t do for the Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, to go on claiming that all HS2’s opponents are “Nimbies.” The fact is that the case for HS2 is in deep intellectual trouble.

A polling station in Tower Hamlets - Mayor Rahman continues to generate controversy

One of the most prominent supporters of Tower Hamlets’ extremist-backed mayor, Lutfur Rahman, has been charged with fraud.

Councillor Shelina Akhtar (also spelt Shelina Aktar) appears in court next month. Her arrest, last year, was first reported by this blog.

Akhtar is one of eight councillors who were thrown out of the Labour Party after backing Lutfur – himself barred by Labour for his close links with the extremist Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE).

Akhtar – whose day job, hilariously, is as a part-time “youth and enrichment worker” – is accused of part-time self-enrichment. She is charged with one count of “false representation” and three counts of failing to notify a change of circumstances which would have affected her entitlement to benefit.

She remains a member of Tower Hamlets council at the time of writing and continues to draw another much-needed benefit entitlement – her £200-a-week councillor’s attendance allowance.

In less than six months, three of Lutfur’s tiny band have been the subjects of police investigations. The second is Shiraj Haque, Lutfur’s chief business backer who is currently under investigation for a massive alleged scam involving selling fraudulent wine in his restaurant empire. The third is Lutfur himself – who has been accused of failing to declare substantial donations from Mr Haque, a criminal offence under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act. (We have been asked to point out Lutfur was later sent a police letter saying that there was “no case to answer.” However, the complainant, Cllr Peter Golds, insists that the police never investigated the matter seriously. See PCC adjudication here.)

And that’s not including Cllr Alibor Choudhury, the former employee of an IFE front organisation who Lutfur has, quite incredibly, put in charge of the council’s budget. Alibor has a deeply unsavoury past and a record of encounters with the police. In 2006, he was charged with violent disorder in connection with a gang attack. The case was stayed at the committal stage after Alibor claimed he had been the subject of an “abuse of process.” Hmm… I’ll tell you a bit more about Alibor’s dodgy back-story when I get a moment.

I predicted when Lutfur won the election that his mayoralty would become a “slow-motion car crash.” It’s crashing rather quicker than that. Lutfur’s curious attraction for the criminal – and allegedly criminal – is yet another reason why Labour must be deeply relieved that it did not give way to some people’s siren calls to readmit him.

Since this blog was first posted Mr Rahman has asked us to report that the police investigation into the declaration of donations has been concluded, finding there was no case to answer.

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ABOUT ME

I am senior correspondent for The Sunday Times, previously at the Telegraph, the London Evening Standard, and the BBC's Today programme. I'm a winner or nominee of various awards, including the Paul Foot Award, the Orwell Prize, Amnesty International Media Awards, British Journalism Awards and Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards (winner 2008, nominee 2015).

I'm also head of the Capital City Foundation at Policy Exchange and a former cycling commissioner for London. This is my personal blog.

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